Sonnleitner, J. (2018). Chronotopes of Apartheid: Transmitted memory as positioning practice among the born-free generation of South Africa. Wiener Linguistische Gazette 83, 28–47. (original) (raw)

Zombie landscapes: Apartheid traces in the discourses of young South Africans

In A. Peck, Q. Williams and C. Stroud (Eds). Making sense of people, place and linguistic landscapes. Bloomsbury Press. Pages 11-28., 2018

This paper explores how the spatiality of South Africa's apartheid regime remains a structuring motif in the way young South Africans perceive and talk about place and space, despite that fact that apartheid officially 'ended' in 1994. Illustrating our argument with data collected in focus groups at the University of the Western Cape, we refer to such constellations of place and subjectivities as a 'zombie landscape' in the sense that the 'undead' and highly racialized ways of speaking about space and place continue to 'haunt' the present. We develop our argument using a mesh of concepts that link the imagining of place to the formation of intergenerational subjectivity. First, we use a notion of 'trace' in order to conceptualize how place is imagined out of the circulation of memories of apartheid and fragments of experience. Secondly, in order to further interrogate how place engages the formation of subjectivity, we turn to a post-humanist expansion of Du Bois' model of stance-subjectivity. And thirdly, we attempt to account for the longue duree of the trope of apartheid as place by discussing how a Foucauldian subjectification can be reconciled with a posthumanist Freudian notion of condensation. We conclude by suggesting that this approach to landscapes of the imagination has the potential to inform new research directions in Linguistic Landscapes, particularly towards a post-humanist perspective.

Keeping you post-ed: Space-time regimes, metaphors, and post-apartheid

Dialogues in Human Geography, 2021

Societies that have undergone systemic change are characterized as ‘post’—post-socialist, post-colonial, etc.—to encapsulate the impact the past still has on their structure and functioning. Research on these societies has therefore tended to adopt a mostly temporal approach, investigating the tension between continuity and change. Using the example of post-apartheid South Africa, I make a case for a more balanced approach to post situations by including space as equally valuable. I draw my theoretical inspiration from Hartog’s notion of regimes of historicity and Massey’s space-time to argue that we should investigate space-time regimes. I show that a space-time regime of entanglement, often passéist, with blurred temporal boundaries and messy, place-bound experiences of time, characterizes post situations. Finally, using South Africa as my empirical grounding, I offer a set of metaphors to describe and analyze the concrete places that this entangled, post space-time produces.

Race, Memory and the Apartheid Archive

Race, Memory and the Apartheid Archive, 2013

Illustrations 1 Informal black housing or 'squatter camp' in the 1950s 2 White, middle-class suburban housing and people in Johannesburg in the 1980s 3 White, middle-class suburban housing and children in Johannesburg in the 1980s 4 Unidentified black township street scene involving children playing 5 White, working-class housing and life in Johannesburg in the 1980s 6 White, middle-class suburban home, children and black domestic worker in Johannesburg in the 1980s 7 Black, working-class housing and people in Johannesburg 8 White, middle-class suburban housing and people in Johannesburg in the 1980s viii 10.

The embodied past. From paranoid style to politics of memory in South Africa

Social Anthropology, 2008

The post-apartheid period has been marked by a dual relation to memory. On the one hand, the process of reconciliation, nation-building and abolition of the colour line has engaged a definitive rupture with the past. On the other hand, a form of resentment expresses a more ambivalent and painful acknowledgement that the past is still deeply present through racism, inequalities and prejudices. The AIDS crisis both as an objectivethe rapid spread of the infection-and subjective phenomenon-the apprehension of the epidemic through controversies-has revealed this duality. Using Thabo Mbeki's statements on the infection, but also on race relations and national commemorations, I try to analyse beyond the obvious paranoid style a politics of memory which unveils hidden truths. The embodiment of the past thus recovered involves both the historical condition, that is the inscription of social structures in bodies and lives, and the experience of history, understood as the elaboration of representations, discourses and narratives accounting for the course of events. Considered in this light, conspiracy theories become not so much fantasies as factual realities, including genocidal projects under apartheid. The recognition of this unfinished business of time is a necessary step in the construction of a common future.

Critical Nostalgias in Democratic South Africa

The Sociological Quarterly, 2018

Evidence suggests that some black residents in South Africa experience nostalgia for the racist and authoritarian apartheid regime. What dynamics generate apartheid nostalgia, and what work does it do? This article draws on in-depth interviews with black residents of impoverished urban townships and informal settlements. I argue that by eliminating formal racial discrimination and redirecting popular aspirations towards the state, South Africa’s democratic transition encouraged apartheid nostalgia, which residents deployed to criticize the post-apartheid state and imagine alternative possibilities. Far from uniform, nostalgic expressions focused on four objects: social protection, migrant exclusion, bureaucratic integrity, and white governance. Each object represented an aspect of the apartheid state that residents sought to resurrect. The analysis calls for a shift from a politics of regret, focused on shame for past atrocities, to a politics of nostalgia, which understands idealized projections of past objects as a terrain of struggle.

District 1: Mapping memories of an erased space in a transforming post-apartheid city

Aunty AP was raised in Napier Street, where her paternal family lived for many years before. Aunty AP attended Prestwich Street Primary School. Her parents owned their home and lived there until they were forced to sell. Her family was forced to sell and they were moved to Kensington. Aunty AP later moved to Bo-Kaap, where she continues to rent a property with her son. Aunty ME, interviewed on the 16th October 2021 Aunty ME was raised in Loader Street and attended Prestwich Street Primary School. Her father passed away when she was a child but her mother continued to live there, where she could lean on their community for support. Aunty ME's paternal grandparents lived in Waterkant Street, where her father was raised. Her family was forcibly removed to Grassy Park when she was in her matric year, where they lived shortly before moving to Bo-Kaap. Aunty ME married a man from Bo-Kaap, who she met when she lived in Loader Street and still lives in Bo-Kaap today.

"It's just taking our souls back": Apartheid and race in the discourses of young South Africans.

Although apartheid officially ended in 1994, the issue of race as a primary identity marker has continued to permeate many aspects of private and public life in a post-apartheid South Africa. This paper seeks to understand how youth at two South African tertiary institutions position themselves in relation to race and the apartheid past. Our data includes four focus group interviews from two universities, one which can be described as historically 'black' and the other historically 'white'. Given the complex nature of the data, we elected to use a combination of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis as our methodological approach. We explore how words such as black, white, coloured, they, we, us and them feature in the interviews. Our analysis shows that the positioning by the interviewees reflects a complexity and ambivalence that is at times contradictory although several broader discourse patterns can be distilled. In particular, we argue, that all groups employ a range of discursive strategies so as to resist being positioned in the historical positions of 'victim' and 'perpetrator'. Our paper reflects on these findings as well as what they offer us as we attempt to chart new discourses of the future.